Dream Job: How an ESPN reality show changed lives for the better

May 2024 · 30 minute read

It was well past midnight on Sept. 15, 2003, and Casey Stern was in the car with two friends, driving back from a Monday Night Football game at the Meadowlands.

Stern, who was about to turn 25, had just moved back to New York after a few years in Los Angeles and while he had a successful career as an executive recruiter, he was unfulfilled.

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Earlier that week, his friend’s mother had called him to tell him about a new show coming to ESPN called “Dream Job,” where the winner would get a job for a year as a SportsCenter anchor.

Stern should go to the New York City tryout at ESPN Zone, she said. He didn’t really think seriously about it. A cattle call for a reality show?

Now that friend, who was driving Stern back to his Long Island home, decided to force the issue.

“Unbeknownst to me, they had decided at the beginning of the night to drop me off at the doorstep of ESPN Zone after the game,” Stern said. “They knew it was my dream to do this.”

That is the start of how Stern got on “Dream Job” and how his life changed, along with a handful of other people.

Stern didn’t win “Dream Job,” — Mike Hall, a college senior from the University of Missouri did — but he is now an anchor on Turner Sports and a radio host on Sirius XM.

Stern is just one person from the first season of that show who found a dream career in sports. Of the first group of 12, eight have worked in either sports or entertainment since the show aired, including comedian Nick Stevens, who is now working at WEEI in Boston, Lori Rubinson, who hosts a show on WFAN in New York, and Chet Anekwe, who is an actor.

The Athletic spoke to five contestants — the final four and Stern — and three people who worked on the show to reminisce about a show that changed lives.

It all started with a napkin at Houston’s.

“Dream Job” was the brainchild of Carol Silver, a producer in the ESPN Original Entertainment division that was growing in importance under Mark Shapiro in the early 2000s.

Silver was intrigued by a New Zealand show called “Popstars,” the precursor to “American Idol.” When she worked in special events, she pitched a sports version to ESPN in 2000, but she wanted it to be focused on little kids, almost like “Star Search” for SportsCenter. ESPN executives were hesitant about using little kids but two years later, after moving to his team, Shapiro took her out to lunch to revisit the idea.

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“We went to a Houston’s restaurant in New York and hammered it out on a napkin,” she said. “We nixed the kid part and said we were going to find the person who missed their calling. Mark wanted to go big. So we did a 29-city tour in like 30 days. We had two teams and we covered just about every part of America.”

Silver said the audition went better than expected. Zach Selwyn blew the producers’ minds in San Francisco and Silver was at Mike Hall’s audition in Chicago.

“I have now a 25-year career in TV and that was a moment I’ll never forget,” she said. “Mike walked in and we could throw any idea out to him and he could do a song or a poem that had do with sports. Stu (Scott) and I, our jaws dropped. We left the audition and called our bosses in Bristol and told them we don’t have to worry about finding talent.”

The show utilized ESPN Zones when they could and did auditions in bars across the country. Wendy’s had a marketing agreement where one person would get picked from applying at one of their restaurants.

At every audition, there were lines out the door.

“It was a circus,” said Keri Potts, an ESPN publicist who worked on the show.

While a fan vote would help spur interest, to fill out the show, they needed judges and a host. Tony Kornheiser was picked to be a Simon Cowell type. Kit Hoover, an ESPN host and a former reality show contestant herself, was added for balance. They wanted an athlete’s point of view and NFL linebacker LaVar Arrington signed up. But the most important addition was Al Jaffe, ESPN’s head talent scout.

“Mark said we’d like you to be one of the judges because what you do all day is look at tapes and help decide who we’re going to hire for anchors and reporters for SportsCenter,” Jaffe said. “He said, we think you’d be good at this on the show. I remember thinking it would be fun and certainly different than what I normally do. I also thought it would give me a sense of how hard it is to be on air. I’m judging people on if they can be on-air at ESPN, so it would be a nice way to get a feel for that.”

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The host was Stuart Scott, who wound up having a profound effect on the cast.

One contestant was Michael Quigley, a 40-year-old auto supplies salesman from suburban Philadelphia, who looked and sounded like a Chris Farley skit. He didn’t make it to the end, but he was one of the more memorable people from that season.

“He was over the top,” Jaffe said. “He kind of did his highlight more like play by play, rather than a summary of the game. He was a fan favorite, I think, as best we could tell.”

“That’s why I wish Twitter would’ve been around,” Silver said. “Quigs would’ve taken off.”


“Dream Job” contestant Chris Williams learns from Stuart Scott that he has been cut at the end of an episode. Standing next to him is fan favorite Michael Quigley, while Maggie Haskins and Mike Hall watch. (Courtesy ESPN)

The show ran for eight weeks on Sunday nights, from late February through March in 2004. The show was taped Sundays in New York, which gave the contestants a few days together every week to hang out in the city.

Each week, the contestants had different challenges. One week, they went to spring training to learn how to shoot standups and do interviews. Another week, they had to make it through a broadcast where everything went wrong. There were trivia contests and athlete interviews. A staple of the show involved calling highlights, which is what the winner would be doing for a year at ESPN.

“Dream Job” was marketed heavily but still, no one knew what to expect. After the first episode aired on Sunday night at 10 p.m. ET, Silver was a nervous wreck in her hotel room until she got a phone call.

“The woman who got all the ratings for ESPN was like, ‘You’re going to be OK’,” Silver said.

She would find out that the show had tripled the ratings of what ESPN had been showing in that time slot. According to Richard Sandomir’s New York Times column, the first two episodes had a 1.13 average rating. The year before, NHL games averaged a 0.38 rating in that time slot on those two Sundays.

Potts was in charge of promoting the show to the media and she would have her own sleepless night when Sandomir came on set before writing his review. His March 6 story was mostly positive, but the headline: “‘Dream Job,’ the Nightmare, Showing Now on ESPN,” gave her heart palpitations.

“Even though the story was a good story, it sucked to see that kind of headline,” she said.

But most of the response was positive, as Potts found that critics were kinder to the young contestants. Then again, there was no Twitter.

When students like Hall and Maggie Haskins went back to their college lives that Monday, they realized people were watching.

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“I forget what week it was, but we’re out at a bar and ESPN was on and they ran the promo for the show and a group of strangers were looking at the TV and looking at me,” said Haskins, who was a senior at Brown University. “It was such a surreal moment.”

Haskins found out about “Dream Job” because she was an early adopter of the subscription news model.

“I paid the $10 per month to be an ESPN Insider and I got an email asking if I wanted to be a SportsCenter anchor,” she said.

Haskins didn’t tell her friends about it, but she took a Peter Pan bus from Providence to Boston. The audition was at a bowling alley near Fenway Park and she remembers proving herself during a roundtable discussion. Silver recalls her bantering well with ESPN anchor Steve Levy, who was the celebrity guest at the Boston audition.

She advanced to the final auditions in New York, where she said she botched her replay call. She was the sports editor of the Brown Daily Herald and didn’t have any TV experience.

“I was the first alternate, I was not picked to be on the show,” said Haskins, who grew up in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. “I was heartbroken. I was so depressed and I went back to Brown and flubbed a final. I was back home over Christmas break, and I was like OK, I’m going to have to do a thesis now. Instead of being on a fun reality show, now I have to do a thesis on modern American history. And I got a call from one of the producers, hey, do you want to be on the show? I was in shock and I said I guess I have to talk to my mom about it. She’s like, ‘Maggie, what are you talking about?’ I called her back 20 minutes later and said sorry for the weird pause, absolutely, yes.”

Haskins had the writing chops to compete, but her on-camera comportment needed significant work.

“The first episode was calm your face down,” she said. “I was very busy with my hands and my facial mannerisms. It was just learning less is more on camera. By the end, I was proud of myself. We had to (do) remote interviews and I did mine with Curt Schilling and we had to look at the camera like we’re talking to somebody and I was very, very proud of myself. It looks like I’m looking at Curt.”


Nick Stevens, Maggie Haskins, Mike Hall and Zach Selwyn pose for a picture at a bar during their “Dream Job” taping. (Courtesy Mike Hall)

As one of two women on the show, Haskins had to navigate the usual BS. She noticed her guy friends at Brown started quizzing her more on sports trivia, for instance.

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“You know I definitely had experiences,” she said. “No guys were told to smile more. That kind of thing. One moment backstage after I’d done something, my feedback was weird, one of the other contestants was like, ‘I don’t think they’re used to women doing play by play.’ Cool, cool, thanks.

“I did ‘PTI’ with Tony and he said it was like arguing with his daughter and I’m like, ‘Dude, you totally undercut me!’ I think it’s a double-edged sword. I also think it made me someone you want to root for, I was the gal on the show.”

Haskins found herself, improbably, on Page Six thanks to a budding flirtation with Hall. A 293-word story ran as follows:

Add ESPN’s “Dream Job” to the list of reality shows heating it up with a romance or “showmance” (“show romance”) between contestants. Insiders say Mike Hall and Maggie Haskins, two of six contestants left vying for an anchor job on “SportsCenter,” have set tongues-a- waggin’ with their not-so-subtle behavior. “They have their eyes on each other instead of on the prize,” says one source. “They’re playing it cool – but they obviously have eyes for each other.” Hall and Haskins are both from Chicago.

“We had a showmance!” Haskins said. “I still have a little clipping about it. That was fun.”

In prepping for the next show, Scott told Haskins and Hall he would ask them about it on-air.

“I said, ‘Mike’s the frontrunner so I figure might as well hitch my horse to his cart,’” Haskins said. “I workshopped that line and Stuart was like, yeah do that.”

So, how did Page Six find out?

“We knew Mike had smooched Maggie and I had to leak it to Michael Starr of the New York Post,” publicist Keri Potts said with a laugh. “Carol said we need people to be interested in this show. That was the belief. I was like, I don’t know, but I knew Michael Starr and I told him I felt dirty about it. He was like, ‘OK, I’ll write it not gross.’

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“For the first time ever, I felt like an entertainment publicist. I don’t think I ever did it again. It’s not something we needed. No person was watching ‘Dream Job’ for backbiting, saucy stuff.”

“We wanted the exposure and Mike Hall and Maggie Haskins were so angry,” Silver said. “Rightfully so, because they wanted to look serious. About four years ago, I finally confessed it was me (and Potts) who tipped off Page Six. They were shocked, but they had a good laugh about it.”

Haskins made it to the final four with Hall, Aaron Levine and Zach Selwyn, and she said the biggest boost the show gave her was about her writing. And while she didn’t love Kornheiser’s joke about his daughter (To be fair, Hall said Kornheiser said something similar to him about being the same age as his daughter), she appreciated his support at the end.

“When I was booted, Tony Kornheiser praised my writing and said I was the best writer on the show,” Haskins said. “Did I want to win? Of course. I was very competitive. But was it awesome? Mike was deserving and he’s had tremendous success since, so it totally made sense.”

Haskins wound up going to Sports Illustrated on Campus and writing for SI.com for years before going to grad school in Boston. Now, she’s a talent manager with Artists First in Los Angeles.

“I always loved storytelling,” she said. “And that’s taken me on the path to where I am now.”

The show needed a host and in some ways, the host they got, Scott, needed the show.

“It was his dream job in a lot of ways too,” Jaffe said. “He loved anchoring and reporting, being at the Super Bowl, World Series and all that. But his real dream, he really wanted to be a game show host. This really allowed him to do it.”

Scott, long an established star at the network, was excited to be in New York with the cast and it showed by the time he put in, before, during and after shows.

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“He was under no obligation generous with his time,” Haskins said. “His presence made us better. Watching him do intros and interviews and it was a really special thing.”

“Stuart Scott did not have to be nice to any of us, but he was amazing,” Levine said. “He was such a mensch.”

Scott would go out with the cast for drinks during taping, but he wasn’t just a good listener or a friend. Stern said he felt that Scott was hard on him at times and he respected the reason why.


Mike Hall and Stuart Scott bonded early in the “Dream Job” process. (Courtesy ESPN)

“One of the things that stood out about him, which I respect immensely,” Stern said, “he was very quick to make sure we understood the gravity of the opportunity we had and the number of steps we were getting an opportunity to skip that no one gets to skip.”

For Hall, Scott became a mentor of sorts. Over the years they would text on birthdays, because Hall shared one with one of Scott’s daughters and Stuart shared one, improbably, with both of Hall’s parents.

But it was before the show launched, at the Chicago regional auditions, where Scott gave Hall a much-needed confidence boost.

“I walk in with a guitar and Stuart jerks his head around and walks across the room and makes a beeline toward me,” Hall said. “Instantly he strikes up a conversation. He’s just the best. He tells me, ‘I’m going to make sure I’m there’ for my audition.”

Hall knew he had two minutes to show the casting producers why he’d be a great anchor. So instead of writing a speech, he penned a song.

“I know about four chords on the guitar so I wrote a song about Pete Rose being a Little League coach,” Hall said. “I wanted to show them I can think on my feet, so I’ll write the first half and improv the second half. That was the plan going in.”

But after testing the idea on his family to mixed results, Hall was worried it would flop in the audition.

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“I swallowed hard and I hear someone yell, ‘Wait!’ Stuart comes in running from the other room and says, ‘I gotta see this.’ He pulls a chair up and flips it, A.C. Slater style, and sits down five feet from me. Instantly you have a connection with someone, which is what you want in improv. That’s what I needed. I had a huge smile.”

So midway through when it was time to improv, Hall said he needed a suggestion from the audience about why the team was doing bad under Pete Rose.

“Without skipping a beat, Stuart screams, ‘They’re all addicted to crack!’ That’s perfect. I made it a misunderstanding about the crack of the bat and a different white substance in the resin bag. It went great. I crushed it and the only reason why is because for some reason, Stuart likes me. He did a nice thing that I don’t think he even knew that I needed.”

From the beginning, Zach Selwyn stood out to the producers.

A former journalism major at USC, Selwyn was already 28 and years into an acting career in Los Angeles. With his long hair, a guitar and a confident demeanor, he was unique.

In his audition, he did a character he’d been working on in his sketch comedy group: an over-the-top sportscaster who couldn’t stop calling the action, kind of like a mix between Champ Kind and Brockmire.

“I went into that audition as a joke,” he said. “And it ended up changing my entire life.”

When he got the callback, the only advice he was given was to ditch the character and just be himself.

At the time, he was in a band and doing comedy in Los Angeles. He wasn’t trying to be a sportscaster, but his opportunity was knocking.

Selwyn was one of the most popular cast members and everyone still raves about him 16 years later.

“Zach really knew sports and he had a big personality,” Jaffe said. “He had a clever, distinctive style. He was not somebody copying someone else’s style. Still, he wouldn’t have been a typical SportsCenter anchor.”

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“Zachariah Selwyn is one of the most talented guys I know and still know,” Levine said.

“Zach and I were roommates every week,” Hall said. “Zach was labeled the wild card because he had curly long hair and he didn’t wear a suit and tie in a traditional sense. He was the essence of cool. He was the guy who would stay out way later than the rest of us and party like a madman. We’d play our guitars and improvise songs together in our hotel room.”

He was such a natural performer that during the show’s eight-week taping, an agent approached him and ESPN talent started pulling him aside with pep talks about his future that didn’t include anchoring on ESPN News.


It’s not hard to pick out Zach Selwyn in this cast photo from “Dream Job.” (Courtesy Mike Hall)

He wasn’t going to fit as a regular ESPN anchor.

“One of the big things was Zach’s appearance,” Jaffe said. “My 15 minutes of fame was when I said to him you have to cut your hair, that was the rationale behind it. Now, frankly, in the pandemic, someone could say that to me because I haven’t had a haircut in three months.”

“It was kind of funny that’s all anyone was talking about, was my hair,” Selwyn said. “Is this really a thing? But for some shallow reason in my 20s, I really did care about my hair.”

He eventually got a trim. Even today, Jaffe felt like Selwyn didn’t like him because of that advice, but the opposite is true.

“I love Al Jaffe,” Selwyn said. “That guy helped changed my entire world.”

Selwyn’s popularity among the fans and the judges helped launch him into the final four and the last episode of the first season.

“When I went into the control room that night, I kind of had a gut instinct that Zach would win,” Silver said.

Selwyn didn’t, but his career took off. 

After “Dream Job,” he guest-hosted “Around the Horn” for a week and did a pilot of a “Total Request Live” show called “Holla Back,” which didn’t get picked up.

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“I was going to be the Carson Daly of the show, hosting with a woman named Free from ‘106 & Park,’” he said. “It was an amazing pilot. It had every element of everything I wanted to do, sketch comedy, sports. It just didn’t go. It was one of those moments that’s supposed to be ‘it,’ and it didn’t happen, so what’s next?”

He wound up bouncing around Hollywood, doing commercials and moving to the channel G4, where he was on the popular “Attack of the Show.” (He’s currently hosting a trivia show and doing other online content in Los Angeles.)

Selwyn also worked for TBS in its digital content division. While he was with Turner, he traveled to Atlanta during the MLB playoffs where he ran into Casey Stern, who was hosting the pre- and postgame show with Pedro Martinez and Gary Sheffield.

“Him and I were just giggling like little kids,” Selwyn said. “Like we can’t believe we pulled it off.”

The night before the auditions at the New York ESPN Zone, Silver was restless. This show was her big break. Her producing career, she felt at the time, could be riding on the success of this show.

“I couldn’t sleep the night before, this could be a bomb,” she said. “I got a call from someone on our production team who was setting up at 4 a.m. and they said, ‘Carol, they’re lined up around the block.’ I had this sigh of relief as I’m laying in bed. ‘This is going to be OK.’”

Stern was one of those people in line.

“My recollection was it was about 2 something in the morning and I’m thinking what am I going to do now,” he said. “There were five people in line before me and I wanted to ask what was wrong with them. It was a nightmare. I couldn’t find an open bathroom for four blocks. I was drinking beers at the game. The last thing in my mind was auditioning for anything.”

But he did. Wearing a throwback jersey, he moved on and eventually got into the top 12. His story was one that Silver was looking to tell from the beginning. Stern went to Boston University where he studied communications with the hopes of breaking into the industry, but he said family issues pushed him into a field where he could make better money in his 20s.

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This show gave him a chance to take his life in the direction he wanted to go.

“I’m a believer of karma,” Stern said. “The reason for not following through in my career was making the right priority for my family.”

After a couple of years working in New York, Stern moved to Los Angeles, where he decided to make a change.

“I started getting really angry at myself,” he said. “I was making money but I wasn’t happy. I was disappointed in myself and the whole situation, so I decided to do something about it. I started paying for radio airtime and studio time to make tapes to send out.”


Casey Stern, shown here with Jimmy Rollins, went from “Dream Job” contestant to an anchor on TBS’ MLB postseason coverage. (Courtesy Turner Sports)

By the time this opportunity came, Stern was hungry. But that didn’t mean it went perfectly.

“I don’t think there’s any way I’d be where I am today if I won the show,” Stern said. “Getting kicked off the way I did was the most important thing that happened to me.”

As Stern remembers it, he stayed out too late the night before his last show because he didn’t know it was a morning tape, as opposed to an evening one.

“The next day was trivia and I can say I felt comfortable that I was in a small grouping of people left who would do well in this trivia thing,” he said. “I completely bombed it. I remember being mad, I think I was the only one who liked hockey and I missed a question about the last Vezina Trophy winner. It was absolutely my own fault. I think I should’ve gone further and I prevented myself from doing so.”

But he recovered quickly and got an agent. Dinn Mann at MLB Advanced Media had been watching the show and brought Stern in to do video work. As the Boston Red Sox took off, Stern went to Boston to do a regular video show on the team.

A year after waiting in line at the Times Square ESPN Zone, he found himself on the field at Fenway Park interviewing David Ortiz at the World Series.

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Now, he’s got a radio show on Sirius XM and he’s an anchor for TBS’ coverage of the NCAA Tournament, the NBA playoffs and MLB playoffs. 

“I turned on World Series coverage and I see Casey Stern,” Silver said. “I was thrilled. He finished fifth or sixth and he was angry and he had the fire to prove it to everyone. Now I see him on TV with Pedro Martinez and Gary Sheffield.”

“I honestly remember the first day I was on the set, it was a wild-card game, I was just sitting there and Pedro asked if I wanted some water and I said sure,” Stern said. “Sheff turned to me and said you realize one of the greatest pitchers ever just fetched you a water. That means you’ve arrived.

“You feel time stopping in those moments and it all goes back to the show.”

Aaron Levine has a well-worn line about his career path.

“My joke was the winner of ‘Dream Job’ worked for ESPN and second place got a free bus trip to Bakersfield,” he said.

Bakersfield was where Levine spent 2 1/2 years as a sportscaster after losing in the finale to Hall. Going to Bakersfield, currently Market 125, was more of a traditional career path for TV broadcasters.

“Those 2 1/2 years felt like 20,” he said. “But I was learning the craft, learning everything that needed to be done. I was writing, editing, driving a clunky sports van. I treated it like grad school, but I was miserable. In retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Levine was a Stanford senior when he got the job. The Los Angeles native had some broadcasting internships, but only one involved him being on air. His biggest experience in college was calling volleyball games for the Stanford radio station.

He actually bombed his first audition in Los Angeles and then returned to San Francisco, where he was more aggressive and moved on to the regionals in Los Angeles. Like Hall, he looked like a SportsCenter anchor.

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“Going back to the audition process, I think the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss’ is a good one,” he said. “I had no idea what I was getting into with the show. No idea how many people were watching the show as we tape in an empty studio with the crew. It was probably the best thing that could’ve happened to me, not thinking about it and just having fun.”


Aaron Levine (top left) poses with ESPN producer Carol Silver (center) and fellow final four “Dream Job” contestants Mike Hall, Maggie Haskins and Zach Selwyn in the SportsCenter studio. (Courtesy Maggie Haskins)

Levine stood out as one of the favorites early on, but he struggled with self-doubt.

“I felt confident, but I’m always inside my head,” he said. “I tried to walk on to the Stanford golf team, but I didn’t make it because I’m too much inside my head a lot of times. I’m a perfectionist so if I don’t get something perfect, I think over and over how I could’ve been better.”

He lost in the finale to Hall, who won the fan voting. While Hall ingratiated himself in Bristol, Levine had to wait months until he landed a job in Bakersfield, where he mostly covered high school sports around the central valley.

Nearly three years into his run there, he had a job offer in Portland. Before accepting it, he decided to make a run at an even bigger market: Seattle, where a producer at the local Fox affiliate had told him he liked his tape.

“After I got the job offer in Portland, I called that producer and said I want to fly up to Seattle and have lunch with you and your news director. I just wanted to plant a seed for the future. It was the best thing I ever did. We went out to lunch and I talked about my local sports philosophy. Believe before I got on the plane back, they called and said we don’t want you to go to Portland. We want you to work for us in Seattle.”

That was in 2007 and two years later, he was the sports director of Q13. In 2012, eight years after “Dream Job,” ESPN came calling with a chance to start where Hall did in 2004.

“It was a surreal experience flying out to Bristol and see the headquarters and going through the audition process,” Levine said. “But right afterward, Q13 signed a partnership with the Seahawks and that included more opportunities for me. I ended up deciding to stay in Seattle and I don’t regret that decision one day. I love it here.”

Mike Hall, a native of the Chicago suburb Glen Ellyn, was a senior at Mizzou when he heard about the audition in St. Louis.

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“I thought it was a cattle call,” he said. “I wasn’t going to do it.

“Then, a friend of mine, Katie, a broadcast journalism student with me forwarded me an email about it and wrote, ‘This is perfect for you. If you don’t do this, I will hurt you.’ Merrill, another friend, sends me the same email and writes, ‘Mike, you should do this. It’ll be perfect for you. If you don’t do this, I’ll hurt you.’ I took this as a sign I should do this.”

With sandy blonde hair and a quick wit, Hall fit the bill for a future SportsCenter anchor. He looked like Craig Kilborn’s younger brother.

“Mike, I think, was most like the typical SportsCenter anchor,” Jaffe said. “He had good sports knowledge, he was funny, he had a standup comedy background, and he went to Missouri, which is one of the best journalism schools in the country. I felt good about the journalism part of it.”

In that first episode, they only explained the voting procedure once, early in the show. Fans were supposed to vote off who they didn’t want on. Hall “won” the fan vote, which was confusing.

“I’m not cocky, but I knew I wasn’t the worst,” Hall said. “Stuart came up to me and said. ‘Don’t worry. It was our fault.’ People voted for me because they liked me, but it still kind of rattled me. I’m 22 years old and I said you’ve got to work harder and it pushed me to do better on the show.”

Hall said his high school friends would send him taunting emails about his ties and any mistakes he would make, while his broadcasting friends were mostly supportive. Teachers moved tests for him. This was like an advertisement for the University of Missouri’s journalism school.

And when he won the one-year contract and the, no joke, Mazda 3, it made sense. Jaffe said his goal all along was to find someone who would fit in on SportsCenter.


Mike Hall looked like he was 22 years old when he won “Dream Job.” (Courtesy of ESPN)

During the process, the contestants were aware that some of the talent in Bristol were less than enthused about the show.

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“When Mark Shapiro first gave the green light to do the show, there was apprehension from some ESPN anchors,” Silver said. “I was getting a lot of pushback. I remember pacing on Third Ave. talking to Stuart because I was upset about it and he said, ‘Listen, we’re going to change someone’s life. Anyone who is upset about it, that’s their own insecurity.”

Shapiro didn’t help matters when, as the confetti was falling on Hall on stage, he decided to program Hall’s next segment, where he would answer trivia questions to get a bigger salary.

“My family is on stage and Stuart Scott is calling me a colleague and two or three minutes later, Shapiro comes over and saying, ‘We’re going to have you fight for your salary,’” Hall said. “He said, ‘We’re going to have you answer trivia questions and every one you get right is $5,000 added to your salary. If you get one wrong, you lose $10,000.’”

And oh yeah, this was going to be live on SportsCenter following the show.

Scott assured him he’d start him off with five easy questions to get him from a $70,000 base salary to $95,000 and after that, Hall could tap out. And that’s exactly what happened.

When he returned to campus to finish out his school year, Hall found himself a little more popular than normal. It wasn’t just the new Mazda.

“For two weeks, I was not buying a beer,” Hall said. “Ladies who turned me down were calling me. It was a fun two weeks. On the 15th day, it all went away. No one cared anymore. It was a life lesson. Why give a crap about fame, because it will go away in a heartbeat.

“Stuart said life was going be different and don’t let it be the reason you do things. He said the people (who) only wanted fame will never be happy.”

When Hall got to Bristol he found himself hosting with someone who made less money than him. Another host would ice him out on the air. Hall figured 10 percent of his peers liked the show, 10 percent hated it and 80 percent didn’t care about him one way or another.

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“Anybody who was unhappy with me or the show, I got it, “Hall said. “I hoped to win them over.”

He was lucky enough to get good advice from hosts like Scott Van Pelt and Dan Patrick, who each pulled him aside for a talk.


Wacky hijinks were ensuing in this picture with Dan Patrick and Mike Hall in 2004. (Courtesy ESPN)

“Dan pulled me into his boss’ office and gave me some advice,” Hall said. “He said, ‘I watched you last night and you’re doing good. I’m rooting for you. Just keep remembering to let it come to you. Don’t force it.’

“Van Pelt told me to think of (humor) as a spoonful of sugar with your cereal. Sprinkle it throughout your show, but don’t overdo it.”

He stayed in Bristol for a year hosting shows and then moved onto Charlotte to launch ESPNU. He stayed through the summer of 2007, when he left to return to Chicago to launch the Big Ten Network, where he works today.

Hall has a family in Chicago and his days of being a wunderkind are over. And that’s all he ever wanted.

“For six or seven years, I was always the young guy,” Hall said. “Now that is very much not the case.”

Jaffe was at Fenway Park during the 2004 World Series with his son when a fan came up to him.

“We’re sitting in our seats and the show is in the middle of season 2,” Jaffe said. “And this guy comes to me, ‘Hey, who do you think is going to win?’ I start saying I think the Sox have a good chance and he goes, ‘No, not the Sox. ‘Dream Job!’ Who’s going to win?’”

Dave Holmes, a Season 1 alternate who was “sponsored” by Wendy’s, wound up winning the second season and is now a sportscaster in Columbus, Ohio. Another contestant Anish Shroff works for ESPN. Season 3 gave pro athletes a chance to win a job as an analyst. But interest waned and the show was canceled.

You can’t find episodes online, though Selwyn said he has VHS tapes in his house. 

Season 1 predated the explosion of the blogosphere. Deadspin was founded a year later. Awful Announcing, which did a “Where are they now?” post on the show in 2016, a year after that. Twitter was founded in March 2006.

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“I was the most pleased with the fact that someone’s life was going to change, no matter who won,” Silver said.

What was the show’s legacy? It gave people a chance to start their dreams. What they did after that was up to them.

“When opportunities come, they creak doors open,” Stern said. “You decide what you’re going to do with it from there.”

Find more stories from The Athletic’s Sports and TV Week here.

(Photo: Courtesy ESPN)

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